These days there's a lot of people to blame, first and foremost PARENT(S)...
Yep, parents, the most solid base a child can have, a learning tool for the child there 24/7 and the one person that can give 1 to 1 and understand
where the child is coming from. We presently live on a council estate, we have lived in nicer places and has a comfortable life before we came here
and our daughter was born but I've also lived in some seriously BAD places so there's a lot of life learning that has gone on.
The reason I mention this is that the estate mentality here with the parents is that you come from an estate and will die in the estate, your kids
WILL drop out of school and will join gangs so its not worth bothering to improve them beyond getting a menial job.
And seriously that IS the mentality here..
My schooling background isn't stunning, my wife is the real clever one of us but we BOTH have a bond with our daughter to help her help herself, she's
encouraged rather than pushed, I sort of went back to school in a way by using the internet to research so to make sure as she got older I was current
with her learning, she's given help where she needs it, encouraged to look at problems in multiple ways and if she's still stuck we give her hints and
we have done this since she was old enough to start taking in information. She's taught every day in a way she gets information but its passed on in a
matter of fact way, if she asks why something does what it does I don't just say, I explain the source and make it short but sweet, not boring but
funny which seeps in to a child more.
She's now 13, she's top of her grades for almost all subjects, she's already being touted by her teachers for great things and she's a mature 13, by
that I mean she can talk to an adult in an adult way when asked in class. But saying that we did one thing I think most parents just brush past and
that's making sure they have a good childhood and are not encouraged to be older than they are, by 13 here most of the girls smoke, drink, are having
sex and in some cases becoming mothers, my daughter does none of that, she does not even swear.
The point of this isn't to parade my daughter as some sort of genius, its to say that parents CAN make the difference if they bother.
That aside we also can blame schools for the way they have evolved in to cattle markets thus losing the personal feel towards their students, I used
to feel happy to query my teacher when I didn't understand, now the children are either not interested, not encouraged to ask or frightened to ask.
The teachers are having class sizes that simply devolve learning, add to the growing number of children here who's first language isn't English and
you can see the system straining to teach the kids properly.
This then leads to another issue, you have incorrectly schooled children who may not want to learn or do but are bored by the lack of education, the
schools then look at these children as problem children who have issues, in comes the Doctor and ADHD, Autism etc etc are plastered all over these
kids like a bad label when in fact most if not all have none of these issues, the system has simply let them slip through the cracks and ignored
them.
Many of these children just need to be brought back to base and re-educated but funding and parental ignorance often mean this never happens.
I also dislike this new teaching ways, the way arithmetic is done on a single line rather than the old way of stacked in tens and units etc. What is
worse is that halfway through her education they suddenly did an about face and went to the original way, how bloody confusing, the old ways have
worked for hundreds of years.
Sadly there's no emphasis on solving problems from multiple angles, they teach and sternly warn that their way is the only way, its one dimensional
rubbish and quite frankly dumbs the child down, the key to learning has always to look at stuff numerous ways, the key isn't always visible one way
but glaringly obvious the other way.
Its simple logic, sadly a notion missing in today's overcrowded schools where watering down the exams to achieve results is thought to be the best
way, its certainly not the best way for the kids!
I hope this makes sense, it works for my wife and daughter and me, it seems to give good results and a stable girl with morals and decency.
Can't ask for more..
edit on 31-8-2013 by Mclaneinc because: (no reason given)
edit on 31-8-2013 by Mclaneinc because: (no
reason given)